A year and a half after Puneet Johar started To The New in Noida, he opened the digital marketing and analytics agency's first office in Singapore to enter the Southeast Asian market. It was a carefully thought-out decision.

Southeast Asia's adoption of ad tech was still nascent in 2013, especially when compared with Europe and North America. Johar concluded his company could potentially become a substantial player in the region if he moved there fast. "There is opportunity for multilinear growth, so we prioritized countries based on their attractiveness and went in that order," said the IIM-Ahmedabad graduate, whose company is now present in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and counts Airbus, Airtel, and LG among clients. He plans to expand into Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia in next two years.

Johar is an example of a growing class of Indian entrepreneurs with global ambitions, who are turning eastward. As Southeast Asia's various startup ecosystems converge to fuel economic growth, Indian entrepreneurs are increasingly drawn to the region for its sizeable collective market, greater ease of doing business, and large unmet demand for IT – because of a lack of local technical expertise to satisfy the growing demand for high-tech products and services.

"Our visits to Southeast Asia were a revelation. There is little access to quality consumer IT products across Singapore, Philippines, and Indonesia," said Shashank ND, CEO of Practo, a medical appointment scheduler that set up shop in Singapore last year. The company has since expanded to the Philippines and plans to shortly enter Indonesia.

Across Southeast Asia, education in technology and engineering is considerably lacking, save for Singapore, but even there talented engineers often take up positions in finance and government. This is where Indian entrepreneurs come in.

"India has great IT schools and speaks English, which is an amazing combination," said Vishen Lakhiani, founder and CEO of education investment company Mindvalley and one of the key people transforming Kuala Lumpur into a startup hub. A third of Mindvalley's top leadership hold Indian passports. "I would love to see more Indians move to Malaysia to build tech companies here or to work for tech companies here."

Sum-of-parts advantage

Singapore, with an immensely business friendly environment and access to venture capital, is Southeast Asia's core nervous system for startups. Companies, after launching in the island nation, can then test their products in tech-savvy Malaysia before scaling up to reach the 350 million people in Indonesia and the Philippines, the latter also a prime destination for setting up service and delivery centers. Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia are coming into focus as well.

"Southeast Asia is the place for global tech companies to get a share of revenue, but India is the place to get technology," said Takeshi Ebihara of Singapore based Rebright Partners, which plans to finance a dozen Indian startups this year. Southeast Asia broadly comprises island and inland territories bordering the South China Sea, including Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – with a combined population of about 618 million people who share similar demographics.

But there is more in the region for Indian entrepreneurs than sheer market reach. "Given the size of the countries, companies that have very regional-centric focus find it difficult to get venture capitalists to fund them. But when a category leader like us comes with a solution for all markets, it becomes an attractive proposition," said Shashank of six-year old Practo, which says it is the largest website in its segment in Asia in terms of searches for doctors, and number 10 in the world.

Singapore-based Attune Technologies, which helps hospitals and clinics automate workflow with its software, said low operational costs coupled with higher price points make Indonesia a top go-to destination for enterprise startups. But while it is cost effective to run businesses in Vietnam and Philippines, these are price-sensitive markets. Additionally, in places like Vietnam, even business meetings are conducted in the local language.

"The fallout of this is that decision-making is slow. And you can't do without a partner ecosystem," said Arvind Alagarswamy, CEO of Attune, which started selling in Southeast Asia in 2012. Prominent Indian startups that have taken the plunge include restaurant search platform Zomato and Zipdial, a marketing firm recently acquired by Twitter.

Event listing company Explara is devising a partner model to bring its platform to the region after successfully setting up shop in the Philippines last year.

Tech-tonic shift

Both consumer and enterprise products are in huge demand in the region. Retail is expanding rapidly in the Philippines and Indonesia, and financial technology companies can find opportunities in Singapore, according to Jungle Ventures, a venture firm that focuses solely on startups eager to cover Asia Pacific.

Jungle has invested in 23 companies across the region over the past four years, including crowdfunding platform Milaap and mobile payments company Pokkt. "Southeast Asia is a fantastic opportunity, with an equally sized consumer base and a similar homogeneity in consumption. A 24-year-old's behaviour is the same across Jakarta, Bangkok, Delhi, or Vietnam," said founder and managing director Amit Anand. In a sense, Southeast Asia, known for its heavy seismic and volcanic activity, is undergoing a "tech-tonic" shift.

Regional governments have been swift to encourage startup activity. Singapore sets aside investment funds for companies aiming to expand in the region, and Malaysia provides equity-free grants to startups. Recently, Indonesia established a Creative Economy Agency to bolster its startup ecosystem. Southeast Asian metropolises are now home to newborn accelerators and prestigious startup launch programmes such as Founders Institute. Homegrown successes such as Malaysia's taxi-hailing app GrabTaxi and Singapore's food-ordering platform FoodPanda have expanded across Southeast Asia, thanks to the auspices of German investment firm Rocket Internet and Japan's SoftBank Capital.

"Southeast Asia has developed a conscious policy of emerging as a hi-tech hub and has built capabilities in both enabling firms and deploying technology for regional development and improvement of services delivery. This is missing in India," said Pankaj Chandra, professor of production and operations management at IIM-Bangalore.

This is just the beginning. Last year, SoftBank teamed up with Indonesia's telecom magnate Indosat to create a $50-million (Rs 310 crore) fund for the country, and pledged to invest another $20 million (Rs 124 crore) in the Philippines.

"Expanding into Southeast Asia is a natural extension," said Johar of To The New, which acquired three startups in the region to fuel its expansion. "If an Indian startup has a clear value proposition and business model that have worked in an emerging market on the back of great technology, then it must do it."